New staff tools, Square

As I mentioned in the "Initial results of the 2011 community survey" thread, one thing a large amount of players would like to see is better moderation of the servers. I believe this issue needs to be addressed through management of the moderation team and policies, as well as technically. GameKribJEREMY handles the community management and I handle the technical side of things. As such here are two main ways I think I can help this issue technically:

Provide an easier way for staff to respond to problems and give them access to anything they may need.

Provide a streamlined reporting system that makes it easy for the community to report trouble makers. This will include a way to report a player in-game.

So I started with the first, and began building a super moderation set of tools that I named Square. Square gives the staff team the ability to research problems as well as keep a live eye on things. It is a massive program that I wrote completely from scratch. The initial version of it was launched on Wednesday (Jan 25th). Here are the main features of the suite of tools:

Logs Pretty much every server action or event is now at the staff's finger tips. For example: chat logs, commands used logs, death logs, punishments logs, rupees logs, etc. These logs can be filtered by server or by player.

Player Management Staff can now manage players with the click of the mouse. For example, banning, kicking, etc. This is a huge improvement over having to type a long command (lol at how hard some usernames are to type) in chat.

Live Dashboards This allows staff to keep an overall eye on multiple servers at once.

Now this new system not only increases the ability for staff to do their job, it also makes us (staff members) more accountable, being that our actions are also tracked and logged. With great power comes great responsibility

The next big project will be the improved reporting system, that will include the ability to report players in-game. This will tie into Square so staff can react faster and manage the reports easy.

I am providing this information just to keep the community up to date on where EMC is headed and what we are doing to keep our excellent quality as we grow. As usual I am open for suggestions and any questions, thanks EMC

The next big project will be the improved reporting system, that will include the ability to report players in-game.

If / when you implement this, will mods be notified as soon as a player is reported? And, if so, will mods on one server be notified of a player reported on another?This would make reporting chat spammers / verbal abuse so much smoother. With the time difference, and the fact that some people are just plain night owls, its hard to always have mods online to monitor the chat. Taking a screenshot of the spam/abuse then messaging a mod on the site isn't a really efficient solution in some cases, so if mods are notified right away...that would be really cool :3Anyway, the whole organization of the logs sounds great! Sounds like the mods will have an easier time checking reports and making sure everything is sorted out.

If / when you implement this, will mods be notified as soon as a player is reported? And, if so, will mods on one server be notified of a player reported on another?This would make reporting chat spammers / verbal abuse so much smoother. With the time difference, and the fact that some people are just plain night owls, its hard to always have mods online to monitor the chat. Taking a screenshot of the spam/abuse then messaging a mod on the site isn't a really efficient solution in some cases, so if mods are notified right away...that would be really cool :3Anyway, the whole organization of the logs sounds great! Sounds like the mods will have an easier time checking reports and making sure everything is sorted out.

the way it works, I, for example, can see all 5 servers open and active, and know the players who are on, and see the chat activity on them. Now, the report option is not implemented yet, so this is speculation on my part, but it would seem, that once a report is made, we will be able to immediately see it, and react to it, from the same page we see everything else.

I am online moderating every server most of the day now. I do not have to log into EMC to see what everyone has been up to. I have become super moderator just by logging into Square. Beware, we can reach out from the shadows now.

I am online moderating every server most of the day now. I do not have to log into EMC to see what everyone has been up to. I have become super moderator just by logging into Square. Beware, we can reach out from the shadows now.

I am online moderating every server most of the day now. I do not have to log into EMC to see what everyone has been up to. I have become super moderator just by logging into Square. Beware, we can reach out from the shadows now.